gShift Gives Marketers Additional Ways to Track Content Performance

As content as a whole becomes the focal point of marketers' efforts, many SEO software providers are adding new functionality that puts the spotlight on content execution, like gShift and its newly released content performance module.

"Content marketers who are taking the torch in becoming more SEO-friendly and social-friendly when they’re writing their content want to understand specific performance on one blog or a campaign of blogs for a certain period of time," says Chris Adams, co-founder and chief technology officer of gShift.

This tool is meant for that, Adams notes, and is ideal for content marketers who don’t really "get," or want to "get" the intricacies of SEO, but just want to know what they’re doing right or wrong.

A dashboard that drills down into detailed content metrics individually by page or a group of pages and filtered by themes, campaigns, time periods, and more.

Reporting that offers detailed metrics on the performance of content to provide monthly, quarterly, or annual analysis of content’s impact.

Adams says that increasingly, marketers want to know if their content is driving people to the website and through which channel. This is what the content performance module aims to do in gShift.

The tool allows marketers to track a page or group of pages as part of a campaign to get an idea of impact like organic traffic, social shares, and conversions for that content.

The "modern marketer," according to Adams, has their hand in all different types of content channels, and is being pushed by management to do more socially and understand what’s happening organically.

Tools like this can be used for short-term justifications for budget, says Adams. For example, if a company hired writers to blog about a specific topic during a campaign, the campaign managers can see what that set of content assets did for the campaign.

And it’s not just activity on the site that can be tracked either; data points about the brand’s entire Web presence can be gathered with the content performance tool, such as if the brand was being blogged about on other websites. Marketers could then use that data to track which publications drive the most performance.

Other use cases for the tool could be to isolate a whole folder or folders of your site, Adams says, to see how they fares against one another. Marketers could use the module to compare different products or services in terms of content marketing performance, too.

And even though the focus is on the content marketer for this module, the more traditional SEO data points that you would expect to see from gShift still exist, like rankings and backlinks to a particular piece of content.

The idea is that with the new module, marketers control which set of pages should be tracked for content performance, and can use these reports to supplement the broader goal of tracking for the website in its entirety.

About the author

Jessica Lee is the founder of bizbuzzcontent, a boutique content services company that offers quality content creation services and content strategy consulting.

Since 2005, Jessica has been in the business of content and communications, with the past seven years focused on the Web marketing space.

Prior to launching bizbuzzcontent, Jessica was responsible for content strategy, development, and marketing for Bruce Clay Inc. - a global SEO firm, where she served small businesses and Fortune 500 clients.

Jessica has a bachelor's in communications and public relations from San Diego State University.

She contributed to the book Search Engine Optimization All-in-One for Dummies second edition, and her writing is featured in an active college textbook, Reading and Writing About Contemporary Issues.